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The Google Workshop for Educators Network (GWEN) is a community for any educator who has attended a Google Workshop for Educators (GWE) produced by Google's education partner,
Computer Using Educators (CUE). This is a CLOSED community.

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Search

Your Guide Is: Rushton Hurley, YSD ("Your Search Dude")

Google's search page
allows you to get all kinds of information in all kinds of ways. Let's
start with a few shortcuts hidden away in Google's system. Take a guess
as to what each of the following items plopped into Google's main page
will yield for you, and then see if you got it right. Did you know you
could do this in Google?

weather Rapid City

time in Kyoto, Japan

movies 57701

dollars to yen

chinese food 57701

GOOG

define:ort

MacBook laptop $200..$400

UA 144

Denver Nuggets

For
a normal search, though, sometimes the key is simply to avoid getting
three bazillion hits for whatever your humble term might be. Here's a
little help on that front:

Have you tried clicking on those terms in the upper left (Images, Videos, News, etc.)?

Activity/Discussion:

Time for the Google Scavenger Hunt! Click here to get the file in a format that will be happy on both PC's and Macs. Once home, feel free to print and share with your kiddos.

Getting Serious

What
if you're going for something different than news on a TV show or how
to get an ink stain out of a dryer? What if your purpose is academic
research? Are there special tools to help you move that much closer to
your PhD? Of course!

With a partner, find a book in Books you would
like students (yours or all of 'em everywhere) to have read before they
graduate. Or before getting married. Or before they have children. Or
whatever. Share what you two come up with with the other members of
your team. Also take a few minutes to see what resources you can find
that would help your students with research projects.

Getting Advanced

Google
also makes it possible to filter results in ways that can be very
helpful to students and teachers. There are language tools, ways to
specify domain and file types, and some creative ways to look at
results tied to related searches and timelines. Start with that little "Advanced Search" link to the right of the search field on the main page. Use what you find to try the following:

Set your Google search page to French.

Do a search that only taps the websites of universities. (Which universities did it check?)

Find Power Point presentations on the Taj Mahal

For
those moments when you want to know what terms commonly get searched
with the one you're wielding at the moment, give the Wonder wheel a
good look. Find it by doing a search, and then clicking on that "Show
options" link you may never have noticed before:

Activity/Discussion:

Try both Wonder wheel and the Timeline options. When might these be valuable for students?

Going Custom

Overachievers
might just decide that the key to search happiness is to tell Google
exactly which sites you want your students to use for a given project.
Can that be set up easily? But of course! Time to explore the Google Custom Search Engine.